STi STuff

A few days ago my STi LG 225 phone went dead due to lack of airtime (stupid $0.10 a day fee! I'll sell anyone the phone and data cable and case and car charger if I can find it and $10 worth of airtime for $50 shipped; it is a good phone though). But STi has obviously revamped things recently so now when there's no airtime all calls are routed to a hotline that says "Press 1# to add a refill via refill card, 2# to use an STi fastcard, 3# to call customer service". Even with calls directly to 611. Wierd.

Also, you can now have a negative airtime balance. Which means that when I added my $10 card I had around $9.80 in my account. I'm sure this negative balance "feature" financed itself nicely. Of course, STi needs that because of their steenking fee.

Another new feature is that you no longer hear your balance at the beginning of every outgoing call; you now hear it just by dialing *555, the number that used to just serve as a way to refill. Yay, finally STi gets soundly into the 21st century! But I'd rather them have the balance announcement and kill the $0.10 daily fee :(. But nonetheless thanks STi for the feature. Please don't charge extra for it.

Lastly, not a feature but a new phone, at least for the website, the Samsung a660, which is reputed to be a lousy phone but it actually seems to be OK, for the two minutes that I've used it, is $49.99(wow, one cent less than $50!)...and you don't have to buy it with an airtime card! Which is great, considering that for the last few months you had to buy a phone with a refill card to get the phone. Props for STi, but they're still below ground zero in my opinion. But they do offer some features not available with other carriers, such as cheap unlimited web access and picture mail...that I don't have anymore.